Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood by Catherine V. Bateson (review)

Reviewed by: Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood by Catherine V. Bateson Christopher Lynch (bio) Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood. Catherine V. Bateson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-0-8071-7793-8, 301 pp. , hardcover, 45. 00. At the onset of the Civil War, the United States was home to an estimated 1. 5 million Irish-born immigrants and millions of second- and third-generation Irish Americans. Many historians have studied the Irish diaspora's struggles to maintain ties to the homeland while assimilating within a nation where they were often greeted with anti-immigrant and nativist attitudes. Traditionally, scholars apply a framework that separates famine and post-famine generations. In Irish American Civil War Songs, Catherine V. Bateson takes a doubly novel approach by examining Irish American identity formation during the Civil War—which lies between famine and post-famine generations—through the lens of the largely untapped war-era songs about the Irish. End Page 87 In the first two chapters, Bateson surveys Irish music that circulated in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, from Thomas Moore's ballads to folk tunes such as "The Irish Jaunting Car, " which Harry McCarthy adapted and transformed into one of the anthems of the Confederacy, "The Bonny Blue Flag. " Irish American Civil War songs were created and performed by soldiers in camp and in prison, and they circulated on the war and home fronts in oral and print traditions. Bateson's refreshing analysis shows that "the cultural appropriation and knowledge of Irish tunes and ballads is counter to dominant narratives that center on how the Irish … were on the peripheries of American society" (28). Chapter 3 examines songs that function as what Bateson refers to as "lyrical war reports" detailing battles involving Irish Americans. These songs extolled bravery, celebrated heroic leadership (especially of Irish-born Michael Corcoran and Thomas Francis Meagher), and spun battlefield defeats as pyrrhic victories for opponents. In one of Bateson's most welcome additions to Civil War scholarship, her analysis challenges the prevalent narrative that "enthusiasm for the war within Irish American Union state communities declined rapidly from 1863 onward, " showing that opposition to the war grew as the conflict dragged on but that those sentiments were far from universally shared throughout the diaspora (81). In chapter 4, Bateson examines Irish American identity formation in songs that invoke Irish history, symbols, folklore, and popular phrases. The next chapter explores Irish nationalism in songs that call for immigrants to gain military experience that can be taken back to the homeland and applied against British colonizers. Chapter 6 addresses war songs from both the North and South that express loyalty to the nation and constitution. Many of the book's themes coalesce in the final chapter, in which Bateson argues that Civil War songs helped the diaspora's vague and unformed notions of citizenship crystallize into a decidedly Irish American identity that viewed the United States as home. Bateson is clear that the book "is not a musicological study" because she "examines the lyrics … rather than the music of these songs" (2). She observes, though, that "tunes carried meanings that emphasized the subject matters being sung about, " which leads one to wonder how many layers of meanings she left unaddressed by analyzing lyrics alone (22). Surely, for example, a song with text about preserving the union would have carried differently nuanced meanings if its melody was a well-known Irish tune as opposed to a newly composed, "American" melody. Bateson leaves it to future scholars to uncover these nuances. End Page 88 Bateson's choice to situate lyrics within regional and national discourses also leaves unanswered questions. She supplies only cursory biographical details of songwriters such as Harry McCarthy and Charles Graham Halpine, largely avoiding the personal experiences that shaped individual songwriters' music, as well as specific performance contexts that shaped songs' received messages. Bateson also writes with the assumption that Irish American war songs reflect authentic perspectives. But this was an era when one of the main forms of popular culture—minstrelsy—trafficked in ethnic and racial stereotypes, and songwriters such as George Root and Stephen. . .